Enterprise ready e-commerce auction product

Problem:

Nowadays the thought of living without ecommerce seems unfathomable, complicated and an inconvenience to many.

Today a large part of e-commerce is comprised of online auctions, selling almost anything to a worldwide pond of buyers round the clock. Online auctions deliver a fast and efficient business model for both home-based entrepreneurs breaking into e-commerce and established companies carving out new markets.

In the world of online auctions, with the closing-bid-countdown and crossing time zones, everyone knows the place to turn a quick buck. With this incessant growth in electronic marketing and ubiquity of online auctions, the client wanted to develop a proficient, secured bidding e-commerce application to revolutionize the purchase of products with competent UX comprising of inimitable online auction options being available to both live and offline bidders and to people sitting remotely with limited access to network.

Solution:

Sveltoz then built a dexterous, dynamic and safe e-commerce application concerning online auction flair with below distinctive facets and bidders.

The application provides a facility for multiple bidder participation.

It has all the tools to support sellers and buyers usually complete a four-phase process: Searching and comparing, getting started for an auction, actual bidding, and post-auction activities. Online auctions include business to business (B2B), business to consumer (B2C), and consumer to consumer (C2C) auctions.

• Offline bidders / Book Bidders – These bidders can pre book the bid at a pre bid price, and they need not be present or participate in the live auction.
• Room Bidders – These bidders are the participants present in the live auction room and can bid the products with their physical presence.
• Live Bidders – These bidders can participate in the live auction and even hear to the live auctioning course by remotely connecting to the e-commerce application.
• Phone Bidders – These bidders can bid for the products without being present in the room or without being actively connected to the application. They can bid through a representative having physical presence in the room or remotely connected to application.

The bidders are made available with list of tangible and intangible products and services to be auctioned with an option to bid them.

In the auction, the auctioneer sets a low starting price and a group of buyers (Room /Live/Phone bidders) bid incrementally higher prices which would be emerging as actual price until subsequent bidder claims the next bid price.

The bidder with the highest actual price would win the bid. The Book bidder would win if the actual price at the end of the bid doesn’t cross over his pre bid price in which case, the product would be available to him at the actual price.

Key Business impact:

• The strategic use of auctions and dynamic pricing mechanisms enabled the buyers and sellers optimize product inventory levels, in contrast to the fixed catalog prices in department stores, supermarkets, and many other storefronts.
• Convenience-Buyers could trade from anywhere, even with a cell phone and through pre bids.
• The market supply and demand requirements could be assessed faster and more efficiently.
• It helped to take the big-business product portfolio to new audience and sharpen the business plan for financial freedom. Online auction app provided an internal, streamlined marketing channel with thousands of customers on fingertips.
• The convenience, safety, and user experience of ecommerce improved exponentially since its inception.
• Increased revenues by broadening the customer base and shortening cycle time. Thus eliminating the need to predict demand and risk of pricing items too high or too low.
• Sellers could gain more customer dollars by offering items directly, rather than going through an expensive physical auction.
• Sellers could liquidate large quantities of obsolete items very quickly.

Key Implementation Challenges:

• The software had to be designed for online auctions in both English formats and other languages.
• An intuitive GUI had to be developed that could be accessed directly via web without any installations.
• The real time auction process, including audio had to be streamed live on the application and have the current information always available to the clients.
• For internal administration, a database interface is to be provided via GUI with statistical reports to allow tracking.
• The software had to be made available to run even on low bandwidth internet connection.
• The server had to be secured and robust to not reveal any information to the auction participant that is not allowed to be seen.
• The consistency of auction data had to be maintained by using robust database.
• Integration with payment gateway.

Key success factors:

• The application was built with tools to support sellers and buyers complete a four-phase process: Searching and comparing, getting started for an auction, actual bidding, and post-auction activities.
• Live audio streaming was implemented to provide real time information and thus simulate live auction atmosphere to live bidders.
• A robust server and database was designed to build secured, uninterrupted application.
• The application supported multilingual public auctions.
• The global aspect of online auctions compressed time and money for both buyers and sellers.

Technologies used:

• Microsoft .Net Framework 3.5
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008.
• C#, Ajax